William Tenn - Lisbon Cubed

Alfred Smith climbed the creaky wooden stairs apprehensively, his eyes on the burly General Montcalm guarding the entrance at the top. To his relief, however, no invitation or ticket was demanded: his costume was sufficient validation. The red-faced general barely gave him a glance from under the plushly decorated cocked hat before waving him through.

It was crowded inside. Scores of Louis XIIIs, XIVs, XVs, and XVIs were dancing sedately with Annes of Austria and Marie Antoinettes to the strains of rhumba and cha-cha. Overhead, two colored chandeliers rotated slowly, unwinding the spectrum upon the glittering, waxed floor.

Where did he begin? He glanced at the platform where the musicians sat; they alone were not in costume. Lettering on the bass drum told the world that “Ole Olsen and His Latin Five” were providing the rhythms, but that did not seem like much to go on. No one here looked like an interstellar spy.

On the other hand, neither did Jones, Cohen, Kelly nor Jane Doe. They looked almost spectacularly ordinary. That was it: you had to find these people in the unlikeliest, most prosaic places.

Pleased by the inspiration, he went into the Men’s Room.

At first, he thought he had hit it exactly right. The place was crowded. Sixteen or so Musketeers stood around the washbasin, munching enormous cigars and conversing in low voices.

He insinuated himself among them and listened closely. Their talk was eclectic, ranging freely from the wholesale price of pastel-colored water closets to the problems of installing plumbing in a new housing development on Long Island that was surrounded by unsewered streets.

“I told the contractor to his face,” said a somewhat sallow, undersized Musketeer, knocking his cigar ash off against the pommel of his sword, “Joe, I told him, how can you expect me to lay pipe when you don’t even know the capacity, let alone the type—look, we won’t even talk about the type—of the sewer system they’re going to have installed out here? Joe, I said to him, you’re a bright guy: I ask you, Joe, is that fair, does that make sense? You want me to maybe install plumbing that’s going to be a lot weaker than the sewer system in the streets so that the first time the new customers flush the toilets everything backs up all over the bathroom floor—you want that, Joe? No, he says, I don’t want that. All right, then, I say, you want me to maybe install plumbing that’s a lot better than necessary, a lot stronger than the sewer system will require, and that’ll add cost to the houses that doesn’t have to be added—you want that, Joe? No, he says, I don’t want that. So, look, Joe, I say, you’re willing to admit this is a dumb proposition from top to bottom? Suppose someone asked you to build a house, Joe, and couldn’t tell you whether the foundation under it is concrete or steel or sand or cinder-block. That’s just exactly what you’re asking me to do, Joe, that’s just exactly what.”

There was a rustle of approbation. A tall, weedy, mournful-looking Musketeer blew his nose and carefully replaced the handkerchief in his doublet before commenting, “That’s the trouble with everybody. They think plumbers are miracle men. They got to learn that plumbers are only human.”

“I don’t know about that,” said a stout Huguenot who had come up in the last few moments. “I take the attitude that plumbers are miracle men. What we got to use is our American imagination, our American know-how, our American thinking straight to the point. You show me a sewer system in a new community, like, that hasn’t been installed yet, that nobody knows what its capacity is going to be, and I’ll figure out a plumbing system for the development that’ll fit it no matter what. And I’ll save on cost, too.”

“How?” demanded the sallow, undersized Musketeer. “Tell me how.”

“I’ll tell you how,” retorted the Huguenot. “By using my American imagination, my American know-how, my American thinking straight to the point. That’s how.”

“Pardon me,” Alfred Smith broke in hurriedly as he saw the sallow, undersized Musketeer take a deep breath in preparation for a stinging rebuttal. “Do any of you gentlemen know of any prizes that will be given for the best costume, any door prizes, anything like that?”

There was a silence as they all chewed their cigars at him appraisingly. Then the Huguenot (Coligny, Alfred wondered? Conde? de Rohan?) leaned forward and tapped him on the chest. “When you got a question, sonny, the thing to do is find the right man to ask the question of. That’s half the battle. Now who’s the right man to ask questions about door prizes? The doorman. You go out to the doorman—he’s wearing a General Montcalm—and you tell him Larry sent you. You tell him Larry said he should tell you all about door prizes, and, sonny, he’ll tell you just what you want to know.” He turned back to his smoldering adversary. “Now before you say anything, I know just what you’re going to say. And I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.”

Alfred squeezed his way out of the mobful of rising tempers. At the outskirts, a Cardinal’s Guard who had just come up remarked broodingly to a black-hooded executioner: “That Larry. Big man. What I wouldn’t give to be around when he takes a pratfall.”

The executioner nodded and transferred his axe thoughtfully to the other shoulder. “One day there’ll be an anonymous phone call to the Board of Health about Larry, and they’ll send out an inspector who can’t be pieced off, and that’ll be that. Any guy who’ll buy up junk pipe and chromium-plate it and then sell it to his friends as new stuff that he’s overstocked in…” Over his shoulder, the rubbery blade of the axe began flapping like a flag in a breeze.

“Don’t know nothing about prizes,” the doorman stated, rocking his folding chair back and forth in front of the ballroom entrance. “Anything important, they don’t tell me.” He tilted his cocked hat forward over his eyes and stared bitterly into space, as if reflecting that with just a little more advance information from Paris the day might indeed have gone quite differently on the Plains of Abraham. “Why’n’t you ask around down in the bar? All the big wheels are down in the bar.”

There must, Alfred reflected, be a good many big wheels, as he apologized his way through the crowded room downstairs. The hoop-skirts and rearing, extravagant hairdo’s, the knobby-kneed hose, swinging swords, and powdered wigs jam-packed The February Revolution Was the Only Real Revolution Bar Grill so that the half-dozen or so regular customers in shabby suits and worn windbreakers seemed to be the ones actually in costume, poverty-stricken, resentful anachronisms from the future who had stumbled somehow into imperial Versailles and the swaggering intrigue of the Tuileries.

At the bar, Bushke Horowitz, his iron mask wide open despite the sternest decrees of King and Cardinal, accepted dues money, dispensed opinions on the future of standpipes and stall showers to the mob in heavy brocade and shot silk around him, and periodically threw a handful of largesse to the bartender, a chunky, angry-looking man with a spade beard and a white apron, along with the injunction to “set ’em up again.”

There was no way to get through to him, Alfred realized. He asked several times about “prizes,” was ignored, and gave up. He had to find a wheel of somewhat smaller diameter.

A tug at the sleeve of his clerical gown. He stared down at the rather thinnish Mme. Du Barry sitting in the empty booth. She gave him a smile from underneath her black vizard. “Drinkie?” she suggested. Then, seeing his blank look, she amplified: “Yousie and mesie. Just us twosie.”

Alfred shook his head. “Nosie—I mean, no, thank you. I—uh—some business. Maybe later.”